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" Playoff baseball is a matter of very big fish and very small barrels. How often can you mock Alex Rodriguez \u2014 noted for his work in the video for Madonna&amp;#039;s hit single, &amp;quot;Justify My Starfucking&amp;quot; \u2014 for approaching October the way that Sarah Palin approaches a dependent clause? Okay, maybe a few hundred more times, but you can&amp;#039;t keep it up forever. So maybe you point out that Billy Beane&amp;#039;s breakthrough theories about running a small-market team \u2014 the ones that loosed upon baseball a distressful exaltation of math nerds \u2014 managed to cobble together a whole sevent-five wins this year for Beane&amp;#039;s team, which hasn&amp;#039;t made the playoffs in five years. You can always land on the Red Sox and their celebrity fans, who were once insufferable losers and who are now simply not losers. Then there&amp;#039;s Derek Jeter, who can still, you know, bite me. And that goes double for anyone who celebrates the grandeur that is The Ballpark at Big Kickback there in the Bronx. Your mileage on most of these may vary, but my favorite fish of them all is Tony La Russa, the career savant (just ask him) who&amp;#039;s managed the St. Louis Cardinals into the playoffs again this season. Somewhere in there he sued Twitter and had an MVP bestowed upon his lineup card, but ninety-one wins \u2014 including a 13-0 shutout yesterday and No. twenty-five hundred for the career back in June \u2014 is enough to get the chorus of cherubim singing once more in Peter Gammons&amp;#039;s head. I first became aware of this particular blight when he worked in Oakland a decade or two ago, back in the days before Beane turned the A&amp;#039;s into a mirror with which to show himself his true genius. First thing you heard was that La Russa had a law degree. This was meant to portray him as something of a baseball intellectual, which heretofore had been defined as someone who spit tobacco on his own shoes and not yours. I was fascinated by the fascination with this; I mean, the world is full of lawyers. (So, for that matter, are various low-security prisons, but that&amp;#039;s another story.) I wondered how many of his acolytes would hire Tony La Russa and his law degree to defend them on a capital-murder charge. Not many, I reckoned. Then there was the ballet school T-shirt. La Russa used to wear this all the time in his post-game interviews. This was meant to portray him as something of a baseball aesthete, which heretofore had been defined as someone who put something larger than a $1 bill into the stripper&amp;#039;s G-string. This particular bluff worked until the night when, while wearing the ballet-school T-shirt, La Russa bum-rushed an elderly reporter from his clubhouse. This is not something Diaghilev would have done \u2014 not even to people throwing apples at his head.  But the truly remarkable thing about La Russa is his rather unspectacular record at winning anything that counts. Eugene McCarthy once said of Walter Mondale that the latter &amp;quot;had the soul of a vice-president.&amp;quot; Tony La Russa has the soul of a semifinalist. Yes, he&amp;#039;s won a couple World Series \u2014 the same number as have Cito Gaston and Terry Francona. In 1989, he won when an earthquake screwed up the schedule and then, in 2006, he won when the Detroit Tigers began throwing the ball all over the field. (One Detroit double-play relay has yet to land.) What more ably limns La Russa&amp;#039;s career, however, is his remarkable inability to win with talent. He had the best team in baseball at least twice more in Oakland; in 1988, the team won 104 games and, in 1990, it won 103. Those two teams had a combined World Series record of 1-8. In 1988, Orel Hershiser of the Dodgers beat them all by himself, and the 1990 A&amp;#039;s got outscored 22-8 and swept by a Cincinnati team that had struggled that season to win ninety-one games. (Peter Gammons was still humming.) Of course, these were the McGwire-Canseco A&amp;#039;s, so it&amp;#039;s possible that neither team ever got the dosages quite right. (The Oakland Triple-A affiliate should have relocated to Medellin during that period.) But since moving his law degree and (as far as I know) his ballet school T-shirt to St. Louis, La Russa holds the distinction of bringing into the 2004 World Series against the Red Sox perhaps the least well-prepared 105-win team in baseball history.  Now the lawyer is back in the playoffs, so watch it happen again. At some critical juncture \u2014 or at several critical junctures \u2014 La Russa will feel compelled to exercise his superior intellect, probably as regards to a pitcher. The TBS broadcast crew undoubtedly will point out the subtle brilliance of this maneuvering, and then the whole game will blow up in his face. If he brings in a reliever, the next pitch will be picked up by NORAD. If he leaves in his starter, the guy will petrify right there on the mound. And, by Game Three, say, La Russa will have absolutely nobody left to come in to pitch the eighth or ninth inning in a tight game. He will outsmart himself again. The wonder will be why anyone thinks outsmarting Tony La Russa is all that hard. RELATED LINKS:  Chuck Klosterman on a Brand-New Baseball Book Is Rickey Henderson the Greatest Baseball Player Ever? A Guide to the Most Hated New York Yankees of All Time WHAT I&amp;#039;VE LEARNED: For the Love of the Game   "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a6494/tony-la-russa-playoffs-100209/>